Designing for Scale: Rebuilding a Digital Ecosystem for Global Agility
With 200 brands across 180 countries, Diageo’s digital transformation isn’t just about speed or standardization. It’s about enabling individuality within a common framework.
With more than 200 brands—from Johnnie Walker to Guinness—spanning 180 countries, Diageo is a masterclass in global brand management at scale. But as digital became more critical to customer engagement, the cracks in its ecosystem began to show. A patchwork of platforms. An explosion of brand sites. Redundant agency efforts. And no unified operating model to tie it all together.
That’s the challenge Danson Huang and his team took on, reimagining digital not as a siloed initiative, but as an integrated enabler of business outcomes. With guidance from Nat Gross at KPMG, Diageo moved from disconnected assets to a reusable component model, anchored by a composable architecture and governed with discipline. The goal wasn’t just modernization. It was giving each brand the freedom to move fast without fracturing the foundation.
Beyond the Silo: Elevating Digital From Sideshow to Strategy
When Huang joined Diageo, digital had gained traction during COVID, but it wasn’t integrated into the broader business strategy. “Everybody was excited about digital,” he says, “but it was siloed. It wasn’t built to deliver against end-to-end business outcomes.”
That fragmentation created problems. Websites multiplied. Hosting costs ballooned. Agencies worked in isolation. Digital was treated like an experiment: useful, but peripheral.
The shift began with a mindset change. Digital needed to move from being a bolt-on to being business-critical. It also needed to operate with more rigor. Efficiency, agility, and standardization couldn’t be classified as optional, they needed to be understood and treated as essential to future growth.
The Shift from Best-in-Class Tech to Better Outcomes
One of the early missteps, Huang admits, was leading with technology rather than strategy. “We had best-in-class tools, but not enough structure around how to use them,” he says. That’s where Gross and the KPMG team stepped in.
Rather than act as a systems integrator, KPMG helped Diageo define what “good” looked like, designing governance models, establishing agency councils, and introducing reusable component libraries. For Gross, it wasn’t about locking things down; it was about giving brands clarity and the tools to act quickly, without duplicating effort
Reusable components became the glue. Brands like Guinness could develop new features—like a ticketing module for the Guinness Storehouse—and contribute them back to the system. That component could then be reused or adapted by other brands, reducing time-to-launch and enabling consistency without sacrificing creativity.
Freedom Within a Framework: How Diageo Governs for Agility
Governance isn’t usually seen as the exciting part of a digital transformation, but at Diageo, it’s the backbone of their success. Component requests are centrally ingested and reviewed by a design council that includes business and technical architects. Clear thresholds define what gets escalated, and roadmap decisions happen on a regular cadence.
It’s a textbook example of how setting a few key boundaries can unlock a next level of performance. According to Huang and Gross, instead of slowing them down, the structure at Diageo accelerates things. “This is the fastest culture I’ve ever worked in,” Gross says. “Without the right discipline, it would be chaos.”
The team designed the system to enable speed and autonomy. Agencies can see the live component library, understand the roadmap, and know exactly where they can contribute. Decisions are made at the right levels— quickly, transparently, and based on clear business cases.
Composable as a Consumer Imperative, Not a Trend
Diageo didn’t embrace composability because it was trendy; they did so because it was necessary.
The company had inherited a mess of legacy CMS platforms from years of mergers and acquisitions. Hosting was fragmented and costly, governance was inconsistent, and most critically, the customer experience lacked cohesion.
“We weren’t chasing composable for the sake of it,” Huang says. “The consumer is changing so much, and we need to meet the consumer's needs. We need to be flexible.”
By starting with hosting and CMS standardization, the team found a quick win: lower total cost of ownership and more control. From there, they built out the component system and began applying the same thinking to analytics, content, and commerce.
Embedding Change Across People, Process, and Platforms
A transformation this wide-reaching doesn’t succeed without deep change management. For Huang and Gross, that meant designing communication and training strategies specific to each audience, from IT to marketing to legal.
It also meant treating composability as more than an IT initiative. “You need one team,” Huang says. “Not marketing over here and tech over there. We tried very hard from the beginning to bring those teams together.”
Everyone needs to see themselves in the consumer journey. Product thinking helped make that real. Rather than focus on features, the team framed each component around a clear business need or customer pain point. That shift made priorities easier to understand, and easier to act on.
Where AI Is Already Delivering—and What’s Next
AI isn’t an experiment at Diageo; it’s already embedded in content creation, internal workflows, and partner negotiations. GitHub Copilot is available to agencies. On-prem LLMs are used to support legal and procurement reviews. GenAI is being used to generate, optimize, and evaluate content as part of a broader content value chain.
They’re also reshaping budget allocations, shifting portions of their workflows to genAI where it makes sense.
But the team is careful to avoid hype. “You don’t build an AI operating model,” Gross says. “You integrate AI into the operating model you already have. You have to look at where the best business opportunities are for you, not just ‘What could I do with AI?’ Where have you got cost, where do you have value leakage, where are the new opportunities you can’t meet. But that has to be the lens”
Advice for Global Brands Making the Same Climb
As we wrapped our conversation, Huang was quick to emphasize that none of this happened overnight. “You need to build the framework first. Think of it like a house: you don’t start with decorations.”
That means aligning on shared business objectives, defining success, and bringing every stakeholder along from the start. Legal, for instance, wasn’t an afterthought. They were at the table early, helping set standards and enabling momentum.
The other critical factor? A product mindset. Start with the user journey, focus on the outcome, and make sure every team understands how they contribute to delivering value.
For Diageo, the results speak for themselves: fewer websites, faster launches, clearer data, and stronger brand expression across markets. It’s not just a digital upgrade. It’s a new way to operate.
Leigh Bryant
Editorial Director, Composable.com
Leigh Bryant is a seasoned content and brand strategist with over a decade of experience in digital storytelling. Starting in retail before shifting to the technology space, she has spent the past ten years crafting compelling narratives as a writer, editor, and strategist.